Appliedi.net Windows Web Hosting Blog

There’s an old adage our parents used to live by: Speed, Quality, Price: Pick Two.  Well, the paradigm has shifted. This case study illustrates how Atlanta Cutlery got a bigger, faster, more reliable web hosting solution from Applied Innovation without breaking the bank. And it all happened in a week’s time.

The Situation:
Atlanta Cutlery has one week to prepare its ecommerce website – MuseumReplicas.com – for a huge burst of traffic. How huge? Their best guess is an increase of somewhere between 300% and 3000%. But the bump is only expected to last for a few days. They need a hosting solution that can be quickly deployed, is scalable in real time, and won’t require a long term contract to implement.

The Solution:
Applied Innovations implements a creative, cutting-edge solution that saves more than 70% off the cost of deploying dedicated servers. By launching a fleet of virtual web servers and hosting them on existing nodes, additional servers required no additional hardware inventory, and could be provisioned in under an hour. The solution is scalable, economical and a complete success.

The Results:
Atlanta Cutlery’s MuseumReplicase site averaged 150,000 visitors per day over the three days of the surge, and the site was actually faster than it had ever been. Product sales increased significantly, and even remained higher than normal after the burst.

Read the whole teeth-gritting, nail-biting, white-knuckle story here. Make sure you’re sitting down.

>> Download the Museum Replicas Case Study

Popularity: 4% [?]

New SSL certificates (or renewals) ordered through Applied Innovations web hosting, will now have slightly more functionality. Our e-commerce hosting customers will now be able to call their websites securely from either www.acme-hosting.net or just acme-hosting.net. This is more convenient, because it used to be that you would have to call your website securely usually with “www” in the url. If a customer came to your page without a “www”, then your shopping cart would have to redirect to “https://www”   In some cases this would be a headache to the web developer. Well, with this new feature, that will be a thing of the past!

Popularity: 6% [?]

Everyone has heard that e-commerce sites require SSL Encryption in order to be successful.  But what about the differences between all of them? What about getting a final explanation for their general purpose? This is why I sat down to write this article today.

Basic comparison between all the certificates we offer: »» Positive SSL: 128/256 Bit Encryption and 99.3% browser compatibility rate. No warranty, no trust logo and no EV Auto-Enhancer™ included.
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»» Instant SSL Pro: 128/256 Bit Encryption, 99.3% browser compatibility rate, $100,000.00 warranty and corner trust logo. No EV Auto-Enhancer™ included.
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»» SGC SSL: 128/256 Bit Encryption, 99.3% browser compatibility rate, $250,000.00 warranty and corner trust logo. No EV Auto-Enhancer™ included.
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»» EV SSL: 128/256 Bit Encryption, 99.3% browser compatibility rate, $1,000,000.00 warranty, corner trust logo and EV Auto-Enhancer™ included.
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»» EV SGC SSL: 128/256 Bit Encryption, 99.3% browser compatibility rate, $1,000,000.00 warranty, corner trust logo and EV Auto-Enhancer™ included. This certificate also includes the patent-pending SGC technology (we’ll cover this further in this article).
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Alright, so now all the features are exposed. You might be wondering “aren’t they all just certificates anyway?”. I do understand your concern for spending a little bit more. But the answer is no, they aren’t exactly the same product.

In terms of functionality, I’m pretty sure you won’t notice any major difference between all of them (probably with the exception of both SGC and Auto-Enhancer technologies), but the most important aspect of them all and what you should wonder is:

“What kind of impact will a certificate have on my sales and how will they help me to convert a prospect into a customer?”

As a concerned and responsible businessman/woman, this is the right thing to do.
In fact I cannot emphasize this enough. It’s the most important aspect of them all – your business image and position on your prospects’ minds. Remember: first impressions are everything, and most of the online consumers will buy on impulse. In a simple sentence, this means you won’t have any competitors if you do things right. Doing things right would mean to analyze your competitors web sites and writing down what you can do better then them.

One of the things you can do is to transmit more trust to your customers. More then your competitors do. If they don’t pay attention to this, then you just found a way to stand out from the crowded market you’re in. You’ll be the “secure” vendor.

Let your prospects feel safe, let them know they are providing their financial information to a responsible company. Your company. This is why I have to praise Comodo’s SGC and EV Auto-Enhancer™  technologies. They will help you to do this; and here’s how:

EV Auto-Enhancer™
This technology will actually turn your prospects’ browser address bar to green. They will know they’re on a safe place, and that you invested on this technology exactly to remind them of this fact.

“Extended Validation (EV) SSL Certificates are the next generation SSL Certificate because they help protect against phishing attacks. They work with high security Web browsers (e.g. Microsoft IE) so that visitors to Websites with an EV SSL Certificate will see a “Green Address Bar”. EV SSL Certificates represent a new industry standard for e-merchant identity verification developed by the CA/B Forum.“

Source: Comodo’s Official Web site

Here’s an example of this technology in action:

SGC™
This technology will actually force the certificate to rely on our server’s Cryptography capabilities, rather then just using what your clients’ browsers are able to support. With Sever Gated Cryptography (SGC), you will actually be able to guarantee a high level of encryption during critical data transmission like you have never been able to do before.

“128/256 bit SSL Certificates designed for securing leading web sites. Server Gated Cryptography (SGC) enabled certificates upgrade the encryption capabilities of older browsers from 40-bit encryption into full 128/256 bit encryption – ensuring your website protects and is trusted by the highest number of internet users possible.” Source: Comodo’s Official Web site

TrustLogo™
This technology will reinforce the trust your prospects deposit on your web site (hence the TrustLogo name) by authenticating your business contact information directly from Comodo’s secure servers.

Here’s an example of this technology in action:

Sales Conversion Tips

• Make sure you place your trust logo on all your web site pages. This should imperatively be done as you never know which page will trigger a “buy-now” reaction. Having your trust logo displayed on the page that triggers this action will actually add weight to the decision.
• Keep reminding your customers that your site is secure, otherwise the green bar wouldn’t be displayed. Make sure you emphasize the fact that this identity verification isn’t done by your company, but by a 3rd party company which is reliable and trustable (Comodo). Always add links to your explanations so your customers can confirm this by themselves.
• Never forget to mention that even if their browser has a limited decryption level, your web server is prepared to add the extra security they need when exchanging sensitive information with your organization.

That’s it for SSL. I hope you enjoyed reading it and most of all I hope to have clarified most of your concerns before deciding which certificate suits best your organization.

To conclude this article, here’s our SSL Certificate products link:
http://www.appliedi.net/ssl-certificates/

Sincerely,
Andre F

Popularity: 1% [?]

Over the past several months we have been working diligently to provide a new support portal for our hosting customers. At Applied Innovations we strive to provide not only the best technologies and tools to our hosting customers but to make these tools easy to use and our support knowledgebase is no exception to this commitment. 

What’s a Knowledgebase?

The knowledgebase (or KB as it’s also referred to) is a self-help support portal located at http://support.appliedi.net/. This portal provides thousands of articles and references for our hosting customers on everything from flash tutorials on how to setup email in Outlook to how to install and configure dotnetnuke.

Why the change? I liked the old system!

The old knowledgebase was great but overtime it began lacking features and functionality that we wanted to provide to our customers. An example of this is the auto-suggest feature in our knowledgebase. 

From within the knowledgebase if you go to http://support.appliedi.net and submit a new support ticket as you’re typing the support ticket message contents you’ll see a search results panel appear suggesting articles that the knowledgebase believes are related to your question.

 The image to the left shows 3 different suggestions based on body of my support request.

By providing this type of live feedback to our hosting partners you’ll have easy, instant access to the answers within the knowledgebase.

The new knowledgebase also does a full text search on articles providing better results and more accurate matches.

Auto-Suggest is a great feature but it’s not the only reason we selected this new system. We wanted a solution that would provide better integration of livechat and email support. With this new system you’ll be able to log into the support portal and see all your past livechat and email support requests.  We find that often the same client has the same question and by providing a support request history you’ll be able to search through your past support requests quickly and find the answer to that past question.

What’s to come?

The Applied Innovations knowledgebase (http://support.appliedi.net/) has been a key part of our hosting service since our initial webhosting launch in 1999. Over the years it has continued to be redesigned and improved upon and this is but the latest improvement. 

Our knowledgebase is accessed thousands of times each day from clients across the globe and is updated almost daily with new articles and information and we recommend you visit it frequently.

We hope the new changes to the knowlegebase are a welcomed addition to your hosting services.

[tags]appliedi.net, appliedi support, webhosting support, support knowledgebase, asp.net support[/tags]

Popularity: unranked [?]